The room was quiet for a moment. This was the confirmation we needed. It wasn’t the proof we needed to expose the plot, not yet, but it was confirmation that our assumptions were correct. The warehouse was a staging area. The trucks were moving men and equipment to the infrastructure targets.
“What else?” the woman asked.
Eddie hesitated.
“Out with it,” she said.
“There’s a problem,” he said.
“What kind of problem?”
“The warehouse has a clear sightline in all directions. It sits in the middle of flat ground with no cover within two hundred meters. The only viable observation point is a water tower about three hundred meters to the north.” Eddie tapped his sketch. “But there’s a building under construction between the tower and the warehouse with scaffolding, equipment, and workers during the day.”
“At night?”
“It was quiet before sunrise when workers showed up, but I don’t know how late they work. That building creates the only blind spot I could find. From the water tower, we can see the main loading bay and the east entrance. We cannot see the west side of the building at all.”
“So we could miss half of what’s happening,” Marcus said.
“Or worse.” Eddie’s voice was flat. “There could be a whole secondary operation on the west side that we never see.”
The woman turned to the Baroness. “Options?”
The Baroness studied the sketch for a long moment. Her ruined fingers traced the lines Eddie had drawn, hovering over the blind spot like a surgeon examining a wound.
“We split the warehouse team,” she said finally. “Two observers on the water tower covering the main approaches. One on the ground, mobile, covering the west side.”
“That’s risky,” the woman said. “A ground observer is exposed. If they’re spotted—”
“Then they withdraw and we work with what we have.” The Baroness looked up. “It is not ideal, but the alternative is accepting a blind spot that could render the entire operation useless.”
The woman considered this.
“I’ll take the ground position,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“I’m the best choice,” I continued. “I’ve done close reconnaissance before. I know how to move without being seen, and I know how to get out fast if things go wrong.”
“Your shoulder,” Will said quietly.
“Is fine.”
“It’s not fine. You were shot less than two weeks ago.”
“And I’ve been shot before and kept working. This isn’t my first time operating at less than full capacity.” I met his eyes. “I can do this, Emu.”
He held my gaze for a long moment. There was fear there—not for the mission, but for me. It was the same fear I felt every timehewalked into danger, the same fear that had kept me awake more nights than I could count.
But he didn’t argue. He knew me well enough to know it wouldn’t help.
“The ground position is yours,” the woman said. She didn’t ask for permission and didn’t defer to the Baroness. This was her operation now, at least tactically. “But you stay in radio contact. If anything looks wrong, you pull back. No heroics.”
“I don’t do heroics,” I said. “Heroics get people killed.”
“Good.” She turned back to the map. “Then let’s figure out how we’re going to make this work.”
The planning took the rest of the afternoon. We went over Eddie’s reconnaissance in detail. We established radio protocols, fallback positions, and emergency signals. We synchronized watches and agreed on check-in intervals.
